Blog Administration

Monday, February 13. 2017

Having a hard time letting go of 2016, possibly because I get the
feeling I have so little to look forward to in 2017.

Queue continues to grow as I pick up 2016 list items -- seems like
a lot of these came from
Jason Gubbels, although …lage Diouf came from an Afropop list I
found on ILXOR, and the Meridian Brothers reissue first appeared in
the fine print under metal-crazed
Uncle Fester's Lucky 13 (or is it psyched-out -- whatever the
fuck psych is). Most interesting HMs are by Autolux, Fantastic
Negrito, and Dele Sosimi (2015 releases keep sneaking in). Best jazz
this week is the new Throttle Elevator Jazz Retrorespective.

Martha sounds good for next week, but needs another spin. Sampha
strikes me as super-overrated (Metacritic score 86 on 24 reviews, which
will most likely make it a top-20 album a year from now, somewhere
between Kaytranada and Anderson Paak this year -- Tinariwen's Elwan
and Jens Lekman's Life Will See You Now have 87 scores but only
8-10 reviews, so their scores are less significant).

Started reading Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the
Origins of Our Time, which is proving uncomfortable and more than a
little annoying. Thus far (120 pages in) the main subject is the notion
that liberal democracy was looking doomed in the early 1930s with fascism
and bolshevism ascendant -- e.g., he cites Walter Lippman arguing for a
beneficient dictatorship. Then as now the driving force behind fascism
was fear, but as I read this I keep thinking, hey, don't we know better
this time? Granted, the news is full of proof way too many of us don't
know shit, and sensible minds are in short supply.